Designers and engineers in manufacturing and industrial research and design organizations are today driven to keep pace with ever-increasing design complexities, shortened product development cycles and demands for higher quality products. To respond to this design environment, companies are aggressively driving front-end loaded design processes where a virtual prototype becomes the medium for communicating design information, decisions and progress throughout their entire research and design entities. What was once component-level designs that were integrated at manufacturing have now become complete digital prototypes—the virtual development of the Boeing 777 airliner is one of the more sophisticated and well-known virtual designs to date.
With the success of an entire product design in the balance, accurate, real-time visualization of these models is paramount to the success of the program. Designers and engineers require availability of visual designs in up-to-date form with photo-realistic image quality. The ability to work concurrently and collaboratively across an extended enterprise often having distributed locales is tantamount to a programs operability and success. Furthermore, virtual design enterprises require scalability so that the virtual design environment can grow and accommodate programs that become ever more complex over time.
Stereo image applications allow for viewing of three-dimensional images in stereo via stereo image viewing equipment. However, few graphics applications capable of generating three-dimensional stereo images exist. Passive stereo applications provide presentation of simultaneous channels, i.e., one channel being associated with the left eye of a viewer (the “left channel”) and the other channel being associated with the right eye of the viewer (the “right channel”), of a video display. Typically, passive stereo is facilitated by the use of headgear which is configured to allow each eye of the viewer to view only one of the simultaneously displayed channels of video. Active stereo applications refer to the presentation of alternating channels, i.e., one channel being associated with the left eye of a viewer (the “left channel”) and the other channel being associated with the right eye of the viewer (the “right channel”), of a video display. Typically, active stereo is facilitated by the use of headgear that is synchronized with a display device so that the viewer views one channel of the video display with the left eye and the other channel with the right eye. Heretofore, however, visualization systems relying on compositing applications for assembling of image portions required specialized stereo graphics applications having image partitioning capabilities in order to realize stereo imaging within the visualization system.